Catlogue Essay for THE Helmet PROJECT By Ellen Pall

Writing has long played a part in Cindy Kane’s paintings. In early works, she scratched calligraphic loops deep into the paint. These invited the viewer to lean in and read what was written—only to find that, despite the resemblance, this was not writing at all but rather an artist’s rendering of writing, evidence that a human hand and a human imagination had been there. Both symbol and artifact, these spidery whorls are the coming together of mark and thought.

More recently, bits of newspaper, pieces of her children’s homework and pages of sheet music began to turn up on Kane’s canvases, usually buried beneath several layers of color and imagery.  The scavenged documents seemed to serve as soil from which her own visions, legible and yet fantastic, grew: bird, map, water, eye, flag.

A passionate reader, in 2006, Kane conceived a yearning to paint on the draft pages of published writers:  looseleaf sheets, notes on index cards, typescript emended by hand on the way to creating the final manuscript. Her "Mapping Writers" series was fired not by the literal meaning of the pages various authors gave her, but rather by such sensual properties as the color and shape of the penmarks, the groove where a pencil bit into the paper, the burst of mental light preserved in a sentence scribbled on a napkin.   Here, words are like fossils in the hands of a gifted paleontologist, forms that attest to the shape and vision of the vanished bodies that made them. The canvases blaze with Kane’s perception of the concentration and longing, the quick rapture and long manual labor that are a writer’s life.

With the Helmet Project, Kane’s journey to the center of the word takes another turn. Here, the nature of the documents leaps to the foreground, announced by the military helmets on which they are plastered.  Pulsing with color, spiraled around the viewer, they connect the headlines and the battlefield, yet at the same time bloom with the images—eyes, birds, maps—that have haunted Kane for so long.

Ellen Pall has written frequently about the arts for the New York Times and other publications."

Artist Statement

Mapping writers and the Helmet Project

For many years I have been working with artifacts, incorporating sheet music, road maps, and cursive writing practice sheets  from my children’s school work into my paintings.

This process lead me to think about what it might be like to paint on the original notes and manuscripts of writers. I am fascinated by the process that every writer has of transmitting thoughts into printed words. To see the raw notes, the scrawled handwriting in the margins of a hand typed page, we have the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing what was never meant to be seen. These original pages provided the backbone to the series of paintings which I have called Mapping Writers.

The Helmet Project was born out of my desire to pay tribute to journalists through my work as a visual artist. I began the project by inviting fifty foreign correspondents whose work I admire, to join me in a collaboration which involved using their original notes from their travels as journalists. With few exceptions, this request was met with generosity on the part of the journalists.

After years of considering various icons I could use to support the notes and paper detritus which the journalists saved, I decided on the military helmet to provide the basis or foundation for the installation. As a visual artist, I have always been drawn to the role that journalists play in informing us about the events which shape history, and to the great tradition of the war correspondent. 

Along with their notebooks, the journalists sent me envelopes they had written on,   cigarette packets, ear plugs, passport pages, boarding passes.... The small artifacts they were unable to throw away  are now permanently embedded onto the surface of the helmets.

My intention was to create a space in which one could be enveloped by a community of journalists. The installation of fifty steel pot helmets hangs from the ceiling just below eye level in the configuration of a circle. Each helmet is covered with the original handwritten notes of the correspondents. 

The  overall feeling as one walks through the space is one of reflection. These helmets have been used in battles, and  the journalists' notes record the despair of people trapped by war, poverty, and political oppression. Yet ultimately the helmets encircle the visitor in the journalists' quest for truth, honoring their ability to bring us stories from embattled places on the earth. 

Participating journalists: Lynsey Addario,  Hannah Allam, Deborah Amos,

Raymond Bonner, Geraldine Brooks, Nelson Bryant, John Burnett, Scott Canon, Neal Conan, Barbara Demick, Richard Dicker, Kimberly Dozier, Steven Erlanger, John Feffer, Tom Gjelten, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Chris Hedges, Tony Horwitz, Charlayne Hunter-Gualt, Benjamin Joffe-Walt, Ward Just, Kiran Khalid, Ellen Knickmeyer, Jeri Laber, Gideon Levy, Jacki Lyden, Jim Macmillan, Serri Mandell, Jared Meader, Steve Mumford, Cayrle Murphy, Asra Nomani, Jacki Northam, Will O'Leary, Jane Perlez, Dana Priest, Martha Raddatz, Sudarsan

Raghavan, Jonathan Randal, Danny Rubinstein, Kirk Semple, Charles Sennott, Anthony Shadid, Scott Simon, Jamie Tarabay, Ivan Watson.